Gethsemane
by Cap'n Pirate Monkey
Summary: John is present in every conversation they have, burning beneath the surface like an affliction neither can seem to shake. And there is something else, harder still to admit. All they have left – all that ties them to John, to everything he ever was and never will be - is each other.


In a darkened Moscow apartment, a man and a woman sit opposite one another.

The man's hair is long, tied into a loose ponytail. It is the pale, dusty blonde of desert sand. His eyes are blue, flint-sharp; they stare out at the blank space behind the woman as if some great revelation might materialise from the shadows at any moment.

The woman's face is wet with tears.

"What happens now?" she says.

The man says nothing, but holds out his hand, unfolds his fingers one by one.

In his palm, there is a single bullet atop a coiled silver chain.

"We bring him back," he says. "Even if it kills us both."

It wasn't always like this.

Over the years, the decades, their mutual antipathy has softened, grown into a fragile friendship. Fragile, in the same way a glass vial of nitroglycerin is fragile - prone to explode at any time, and likely to take the entire building with it.

It started with a slap in the face.

She opens the door, hoping it'll be anyone but him, but there he is, and his eyes are dark and troubled, the indigo-grey of a stormy sky.

"Adam," she says, in a voice that suggests even a carpet salesman would be more welcome.

"He's gone," he says, and pushes past her into the hall. She's dumbfounded, both at his sheer audacity and those two words, pregnant with implications, none of them good.

"I didn't give you permission..." she starts, but he turns, so quickly she thinks he's going to shoot her. She recoils, instinctive; his hands are empty, but there's a rigidity of posture, an anger in the thin white line of his mouth.

"Eva," he says, softer now, the reluctant bearer of bad news. He's so young, so disgustingly young, and even as her own body is beginning to soften and sag his remains defiantly perfect, all sharp angles and china-pale skin. "He's gone. He found out. About the project."

It's not quite the shock it ought to be. A pair of mewling, squalling infants moulded slavishly in his image - it's a difficult thing to hide, and Eva knows, as sure as she knows the topography of her own scars, that those responsible will have done nothing whatsoever to keep them hidden. It's a point of pride, a sick trophy, and it hurts her like nothing else ever has to see them paraded like that.

They wouldn't understand. How could they? They've never been parents.

"Oh." Her fingers tighten on the doorframe. The September air is cold against her exposed forearms. Adam is dressed in a black greatcoat; a red woollen scarf is tied loosely around his neck. Stylish, as always, and prepared for the cold as only a Russian truly can be.

"Is that all you have to say for yourself?"

"What do you want me to do? Drop to my knees, rend my garments, gnash my teeth? You knew this was going to happen." He's studying her intently with those ice-chip eyes, running the length of her body shamelessly and without even a hint of lust. It unnerves her; she's not used to men looking at her that way. Sizing her up. Judging how many bullets it would take to still her heart for good. "We both knew."

He's sneering now, his lip raised high enough so the tips of his teeth are visible, a predatory flash of white. "But you went along with it anyway, didn't you? Because you were so damn desperate. Because you thought they'd let you play happy families." His fury is tangible; his every muscle is taut to snapping, but Eva can't find it in herself to be afraid of him. Under all that bluster and white-hot rage is sadness, consuming him like something malignant. "How does it feel, Tanya? To never have held the bastard children you helped create? Was it worth it?"

The slap is a reflex. A red imprint blooms across one impeccable cheekbone. She draws her hand back, feeling the sting of contact in the tips of her fingers. He barely flinches.

"I don't recall you objecting too strongly, Adamska," she says coldly.

"I would have," he replies "if I'd known it would end like this. If I'd known how much they hid from him. How much _you_ hid from him."

Eva doesn't reply. She closes the door, pushes past him into the kitchen where she breathes, deep and soothing. Slowly, and in as many languages as she can remember, she counts to ten.

Years pass.

They pass without fanfare, without applause. Adam chases John's ghost around the globe, restless, bloodying his hands at every opportunity and finding precious little trace of his quarry. Eva pines in her Czech apartment, clutching the only picture she has of her lost children, as if the sheer force of her love for them might bring them to life. They speak sometimes, but it's awkward, halting; neither is willing to speak of John, or admit their individual roles in his disappearance. And yet, he is present in every conversation they have, burning beneath the surface like an affliction neither can seem to shake. And there is something else, harder still to admit.

All they have left – all that ties them to John, to everything he ever was and never will be - is each other.

In the Moscow apartment, the woman reaches out a tentative hand.

The bullet is a cold, hard little heart beneath the ribcage of their entwined fingers.

"You'd offer up my life as well as your own?" she asks. His hands are warm and dry and sandpaper rough; she traces the uneven topography of his calluses with the pad of her finger, familiar now.

He smiles. Gives her fingers a perfunctory squeeze.

"For him," the man says, with unerring certainty "I would offer up the whole damn world."

Adam comes to her one cold November night after a summer in Afghanistan, toying with the mujahideen like a kitten with a baby bird. She has been alone, for the most part, and to see him there, soaked to the skin on her doorstep elicits something within her that is frighteningly close to relief. His pale, rain-slicked hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail; his coat hangs loose off narrow shoulders.

"You look thin," she says.

He shuffles wordlessly into the living room, leaving a trail of damp footprints soaking into the hall carpet.

"I'm tired," he says, collapsing bonelessly into the sofa, and he does look tired. His skin has been burnished a pale gold by the harsh desert sun; his face is jackal-narrow, set with fine lines like weathered rock. "I'm tired of this. Of doing nothing. When did we lose our teeth, Tanya?"

She rankles at the nickname. "What can we do, kotyonok? Besides staying alive? What good has following him done you? You're thin, Adamska, and you look old. Enough, now. Time to rest."

"Rest?" He's on his feet in a matter of seconds; he's alive with that lean, dangerous energy she knows so well. He circles her like a wolf, eyeing the soft flesh of her throat with unabashed hunger. "Like you, you mean? Rotting in this shoebox, growing soft and pathetic, dreaming futile little dreams of motherhood? I can't rest. I won't rest. They took my...The Boss' memory...and made a joke of her legacy. They drove John from me." For a single beat, he falters, drops his gaze. "From us."

"You talk as if I don't understand," she says quietly.

"Do you understand?" He's close now; he smells of rain, of wet desert earth and maleness, warm and familiar, and the urge to reach and touch him, to feel familiar skin, is overwhelming. "Tell me. Because sometimes I'm not so sure. Am I fighting alone now?"

His eyes are wide, and as she stares, unblinking, unintimidated, she sees herself reflected in the pale blue of his irises; hard-faced, bitter, as hurt as she is angry. One hand reaches out; her fingers trace the swell of his carotid artery. The dry heat of his skin is delicious. He shudders involuntarily, looking thoroughly disgusted at himself as his body reacts to her touch.

"You can't do this without me," she says. Her voice is a low rumble somewhere deep in her throat, and it is only as her fingers travel down, splayed out across his chest (muscle and bone and fast-pulsing blood) that she realises just how lonely these months have been. He regards her with careful contempt, and under that, the merest glimmer of animal lust; it surprises her, and she knows it must surprise him too.

He snatches her wrist. Her bones are delicate in his grasp.

"I don't need you," he spits, and releases her, discards her like something broken and unwanted. She stands straight, defiant. "What can you do for me, Eva? An ageing, reclusive whore drowning in her own self-pity. Why would I need you?"

"Because you have nobody else," she says.

Adamska sneers. He has nothing to say. Nothing to counter with. Eva fancies she can see the frustration boiling up, hissing through his veins like venom.

They dance this dance for a time. Their interactions are a frenzy of accusations, of anger and raised hackles and violence. They wound one another; they share their hurt in the only way they know, by sharing it, passing it on in the hope they will someday be rid of it. Sometimes, exhausted, they settle wordlessly against one another, a not-quite embrace, her head pillowed against his shoulder, his arm slung carelessly around her waist; she is warm, and he is solid, and sometimes that is enough. Sometimes.

Sometimes, he sleeps, and she cannot, and she sits in the dark listening to the gentle rhythm of his breathing, wondering what he dreams of, knowing she'll never ask.

Everything changes when John dies.

Adamska tells her first, and holds her as she cries; thirty years of love and yearning and hope crash down around her, collapsing into irreparable pieces. She knows he must feel the same, but he remains silent as she sobs into his shoulder, clutching his lapels. When she's done, she pulls away, sees herself reflected, puffy and pathetic, in the chill blue of his irises.

"It's over," he says, quietly, and it's as close to an admission of defeat as Eva has ever heard. She cradles his face in both hands, shaking her head, whispering 'no' as if it might change things if she just says it enough. "He's gone. We're too late, Eva."

"Did you see his body?" she asks, and he regards her as if she's gone mad, grasping at such outlandish straws.

"No," he replies.

There is defiance in the sharp jut of her chin. She crosses her arms, like a child deprived of a favourite toy.

"Then he's not dead." She knows he's supressing the urge to yell at her. She can see it in the way he reaches for the bridge of his nose, massaging with balletic fingers. "He can't be."

"He can be, and he is. Eva, I…you know how far I would go to keep him safe. You know what I'd give to keep him with us. With me." The 'us' slips out naturally, smooth and perfect, and he looks troubled by it, as if the very prospect of sharing is alien to him. "He's dead. I saw the documentation. It's all official."

"But not his body."

Adamska clucks his tongue, averts his gaze, as if afraid he'll say something he regrets. Eva places a light-fingered hand on his face, thumb resting against the strong line of his jawbone and tilts his face so he's looking right at her, eye to eye, unblinking, and in a voice like dry grass, she says – "you feel it, don't you? He's still alive, and you can feel it. So can I, Adam." She's smiling now, eyes bright and glassy with unspent tears, and she's never seen him look quite so vulnerable as in that moment, exposed, stripped of his last meagre defences. He looks young, and angry, and helpless.

When they kiss, it tastes of her tears and his vitriol, sharp and bitter and delicious.

They fuck because there's nothing left to lose, and this last taboo seems so quaint now, laughably so. They've killed for each other, torn pieces from each other; their lives are so inextricably tangled now that it seems faintly ridiculous to compete. They are each other, and John is them, and they are him, the three of them woven into one, except John is missing from the equation and they both feel his loss as acutely as a wound. They compensate through physicality. She wraps strong thighs around his torso and squeezes, so hard it makes him gasp, and she smirks to see him like that, writhing with pleasure-pain and utterly confused at the femininity of its source. Eva wonders, as she rides him with an enthusiasm she hadn't anticipated, whether or not he's ever felt a woman this way before. Whether the wet, silk smoothness of her repulses him. He traces her outline with uncertain fingers, skimming, as if she might burn, and draws back, closes his eyes, no doubt pretending this is something other than what it is.

She's okay with that.

Eva closes her eyes and imagines John beneath her, tries to ignore the way Adamska's lean, desert-dog musculature (so unlike John, his thick muscles like rope, taut beneath too-hot skin) betrays her fantasy.

In the darkened, sex-scented bedroom, they lie apart, sweat cooling on their bare bodies, and they plan. And cocooned in that darkness, whispered between them like a dirty secret, those plans don't sound half as insane as they do the next morning, when cold fingers of light peel through the gaps in the curtains, and they dress, only vaguely ashamed of what transpired the night before, and not enough so that it won't happen again.

The woman extracts her hand from the man's loose grasp, taking with her the bullet, symbol of a lifelong obsession, one that is poised to destroy him and take her with it. Years of planning and scheming and stockpiling end here, tonight, when their nebulous ideas and scribbled notes blossom into something bigger, something that will swallow the lives of those around them as if they are of scant importance. Among them, the twin sons of Big Boss, Eva's lost children, and for her the sacrifice seems so much greater, because she must offer them up too. The children she has never spoken to, never embraced, never seen, save for a glimpse of dark hair as Clark whisked them away. Adamska asks her how she can feel so strongly about them – they aren't hers by blood or by bond, she has no claim to them but as an incubator – and she smiles sadly, because he can never know that kind of love.

They part for the final time in Prague – he minus an arm, she minus a son (between prosthetics, his sleeve hangs empty, and Eva knows how badly he must feel its loss.) The next time they meet, they will have to play at being enemies. It's not so hard a task when they draw on the mutual antipathy of years long past. She's built herself a fortress and filled it with lost children, the whore turned Madonna, and they look to her as if there is nothing else in the world they can trust. He's built himself an army and delights in the theatrical; he treats the entire thing like it's the world's most grandiose swansong, and although Eva rolls her eyes at his duster coat and expensive leather holster, she can't help but think it appropriate. He is the Man With No Name, and she is the only one who remembers what his mother named him.

She pours him a double whiskey in a crystal tumbler, and he takes it, swirling the amber liquid around before swallowing it in one long gulp. It's cold in Prague, and a thin sheen of ice coats the cobbled streets, reflecting the sick yellow of the sodium lamps back up towards the sky. They sit in Eva's drawing-room in silence, drinking entirely too much alcohol and talking about old times as if their lives have been completely normal – the poker games with John and Clark and Donald, the stint in Vietnam where Adamska had blistered in the sun and Eva had laughed a little too much.

"I just wanted you to know, Adam," Eva says, draining the last of the whisky into her glass – Irish whiskey, expensive, smooth as cream – "that no matter what happens now, I don't regret any of this. Not a thing."

Adamska looks up at her with tired eyes, red-rimmed, the corners of his mouth downturned in drunken melancholy.

"We'll drown in our own blood," he says, contemplative. "I'll die a comic-book villain, and you'll die a lonely old spinster, and neither of us will live to see him. You know that, don't you?"

"I know," Eva nods. "And still, I don't regret it. This is our chance to make things right. To make amends…" the ghost of Zero, there, omnipresent, and they both look away, the weight of their transgressions momentarily tangible. "I love him. Isn't that all that matters, in the end?"

They clink glasses. Drain the last drops of the expensive Irish whiskey, feeling the pleasant burn tracing a path down their throats.

And look out onto the Czech night, at the streetlamps glittering in the dark like cat's eyes and the river like a glossy black ribbon. Together, for the last time.


End file.
